A courageous account of a challenging life that ultimately becomes an exhausting read.
A woman forced to flee Iran with her family battles lifelong mental illness, racism, and sexual abuse in this debut memoir.
When Iran descended into violent revolution, debut author Majidi’s family, which had close ties to the shah, was compelled to escape to New Jersey. The clan was plunged into turmoil—her siblings turned angry and reckless, her mother sought comfort in alcohol, and her father plummeted into a deep depression. In addition to financial hardship—her family’s savings was marooned in Iran—Majidi also weathered social and cultural isolation. She scored some measure of solace in academic achievement in high school, but she was plagued by a pendulum swing between anxiety and depression and fell into an abusive relationship with a possessive 19-year-old man. She went to Barnard College and later earned an MFA in writing from the New School, discovering a love of literature and creative production. But she was repeatedly victimized by craven men and raped by two colleagues while she worked for Rolling Stone magazine. Majidi pressed charges, but she was never quite taken seriously by the authorities, and it became increasingly clear that justice would never be delivered. The author fell in love with her married writing instructor, James, and when he turned his back on her, she obsessively stalked him for years and sent him thousands of emails. She became engulfed by paranoid delusions, convinced her novel had been stolen for politically conspiratorial purposes and was somehow responsible for fomenting tumult in Iran and that her home was filled with poisonous gas. The author bravely explores three explosive issues—mental illness, racism, and misogyny—with bracing candor. In addition, she provides an engrossing and timely look at the way women of color are doubly objectified, as exotic sexual quarry and as individuals worthy of contempt. But her ambitious account should have been pared down considerably—Majidi buries readers under an accumulation of autobiographical facts that eventually turn into a cumbrous weight. Finally, readers be warned: This is not a story of inspiring redemption—it begins and ends with acid bitterness.
A courageous account of a challenging life that ultimately becomes an exhausting read.Pub Date: Dec. 6, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-973484-17-2
Page Count: 335
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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